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·PRIVATE MORALS. If the civil rights movement has been the most dramatic, it is in the area of morals that the deepest changes have occured. The large-scale, disastrous attempt to legislate morality, exemplified by Prohibition, will hardly be repeated. And since World War II, Protestants—increasingly, Catholics as well—have witnessed an unprecedented evolution of their churches' attitude toward marriage and sex. In 1956, the United Lutheran Church in America abolished the denomination's long-standing restriction on remarriage of the guilty party in divorce, decided to permit Lutheran pastors to remarry any divorced person who showed repentance. Marriage is a "lifelong, indissoluble union," declared the delegates, "but God in his love does accept the sinner." The Methodist Social Creed was similarly revised to allow a minister to perform a marriage when the divorced person "is sufficiently aware of the factors leading to the failure of the previous marriage" and "sincerely preparing to make the proposed marriage truly Christian."
On the subject of birth control, the Methodists' 1944 creed is totally silent, while that of 1964 declares that "planned parenthood, practiced in Christian conscience, fulfills the will of God." Before World War I, the U.S. Episcopalians, like the Anglicans, still called birth control "demoralizing." In October 1966, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church declared that "we affirm and support programs of population control." Even the Roman Catholic Church, until recently a staunch battler against liberalized birth control and divorce laws wherever they turned up, has begun to soft-pedal its opposition. Last year such liberalized laws have been passed by the legislature in New York and Massachusetts where they had previously been blocked by Catholic pressure.
The new battle in Protestant-Catholic relations is over a number of bills to liberalize abortion laws that are currently pending in state legislatures, designed to provide for legal abortions in cases of rape, incest, and a threat to the mother's health attested to by qualified physicians. In every case the Catholic Church, which considers abortion equivalent to murder, is fighting hard to kill these measures. In Chicago last week, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops authorized a new "educational campaign" against the proposed laws, with a first-year budget of $50,000. In New York, an abortion bill was defeated last month. In Colorado, where Catholic influence is weaker, such a law was passed.
The controversy raises an important issue. There is no question that such matters as abortion must be regulated; but is it proper for this regulation to be imposed by the moral precepts of a particular church? For that matter, is it proper for Christian precepts to be imposed on a society, including its non-Christian citizens?